The first time I saw Asteroid City, it was a disaster. I couldn’t connect with a single character. Each one felt like a collection of quirks hiding the fact that there was nothing below the surface. The story-within-a-story-within-a-story structure was too clever by half. After that first screening, I was ready to write off Wes Anderson’s latest effort as demonstrating a peak example of the idiosyncratic director’s style, but with none of those touching, emotionally charged moments from his previous works.
On the morning I was supposed to hammer my thoughts about the movie into a proper review, I decided to be lazy. A poor night of sleep and the siren song of the comfortable bed in the quiet early morning hours convinced me to bank more shuteye. It was the best decision I could have possibly made.
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The key moment in Baz Luhrmann’s latest cinematic maximalist bacchanal – about the one and only King of Rock and Roll, Elvis Presley – comes within the picture’s first five or ten minutes. The internet meme culture overlords got it immediately. It’s the scene, which became a viral sensation, of Tom Hanks’s Colonel Tom Parker being informed that the voice he’s hearing on the radio, Elvis singing That’s All Right, belongs to a white man. “He’s white…,” Hanks’s Parker says as if in a trance; it’s half-question, half-stunned-declarative-statement.
Col. Tom – who represented Presley from 1956 until the singer’s tragic death in 1977 and helped himself to over half of everything Elvis earned – is our (not so) humble narrator. He acknowledges that some will consider him “the villain of this here story.” Luhrmann let’s Col. Tom have his say, but he also uses his strong directorial hand to make sure we see the one-time carnie’s legacy of selfish and cruel behavior and the role it played in Elvis’s descent into addiction, despair, and, ultimately, death.
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There’s something not quite right with the new World War II action film Greyhound. There are numerous thrilling moments contained in its taught, 91-minute runtime, to be sure. I lost count of the number of times an image, or a sound, or a stunning sequence of battleships in action gave me chills. The problem is, all those individual moments never add up to a whole that’s greater than the sum of its parts.
I felt what star/screenwriter Tom Hanks – this is the third feature-film screenplay from America’s Dad, after That Thing You Do and Larry Crowne – and director Aaron Schneider were trying to give me: a tense, non-stop thrill ride of a war film that’s lean on plot and packed with heart-stopping adventure. But it’s a little too flimsy on plot – one inexplicable scene actually highlights this fact – and the action, while quite rousing in brief moments, is too mired in CGI and rain-soaked scenery. The exciting effect is fleeting at best.
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The North Texas Film Critics Association (NTFCA), of which I am a member, voted this month to honor the best films of 2019. As an organization, the NTFCA is proud to call attention to outstanding achievements in the craft of filmmaking. I consider movies to be not only entertainment, but in the best examples, they are also art. They teach us about the human condition. Here are the winners for each category in which we voted:
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I was 15 in 1995 when the first Toy Story was released. That’s a bit older than the target audience for Pixar’s inaugural feature film, but I vividly remember seeing it and being dazzled by both the story and the groundbreaking animation. I’ll be 40 next year. I’ve been wowed by each successive Toy Story installment released over the last quarter century. Both the astonishing leap in digital animation technology and the touching stories involving old pals Sheriff Woody, Buzz Lightyear, and the rest of the gang – Toy Story 2 and 3 consistently bring me to tears with every revisit – get better with each new film.
That’s definitely the case with the seemingly impossible jump in animation quality between Toy Story 3 and Toy Story 4. The plot, however, isn’t quite up to the level of the earlier films, especially Toy Story 3, probably the strongest of the series. While “cash grab” is too strong a phrase, this is the first entry in the franchise that feels like the artistic vision got a little fuzzy.
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When future filmmakers craft the pop culture version of history about our current political age – and what a sad, sickening history it will be – they’ll no doubt have an almost bottomless pit of stories to tell. Stories about people who worked tirelessly to uncover corruption, collusion, and incompetence at the highest levels of government. Let Liz Hannah and Josh Singer’s screenplay for The Post be a guide to telling those stories. It stands in the company of movies like All the President’s Men and Spotlight.
This is Hannah’s first attempt at feature screenwriting, and she wrote it solo in early 2016. Singer, who won a best original screenplay Oscar with Tom McCarthy for 2015’s Spotlight, was brought on board to do a rewrite just before filming began. Their movie is about the vital role a free and open press has in a democracy.
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Clint Eastwood is a director who is masterful at orchestrating deeply powerful movie moments. From the dramatic standoffs in Unforgiven to the highly charged combat scenes in the controversial American Sniper, Eastwood is exceptional at delivering thrilling cinema. His tension-building skills are on full display in Sully, the dramatic retelling of the real life 2009 “Miracle on the Hudson.” It’s a story that’s tailor-made for a movie: US Airways pilot Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger landed his airbus A-320 on the Hudson River when a flock of geese flew into the plane, disabling both engines. He and First Officer Jeffery Skiles performed this ‘miracle’ without losing a single passenger or crew member.
Eastwood and screenwriter Todd Komarnicki revisit the crash multiple times, interweaving it with scenes of the National Transportation Safety Board investigation in the weeks following the unbelievable landing. It’s these scenes of the investigation that threaten to bring the movie down. But Sully stays aloft, delivering a tense, powerful, and ultimately uplifting study of quiet heroism.
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The most interesting thing about A Hologram for the King is its title. It isn’t a bad movie, but about the best I can do is damn it with faint praise. It’s just okay. Based on the novel by Dave Eggers, Hologram tells the story of Alan Clay, a down-on-his-luck salesman who travels to Saudi Arabia to pitch a new I.T. and teleconferencing system to the King. Alan’s company spent millions developing this revolutionary new system, which incorporates hologram technology so that corporations and (in this case) governments can hold meetings with people across the globe in a way speaker phones and video monitors could never do. A trip that should take about a week turns into months, however, as Alan and his team are continually rebuffed by the royal officials: they are given a tent with no air conditioning, no food, and no Wi-Fi signal to prepare their presentation. They don’t even know when the King will be in town, much less when he will view their presentation. Along the way, we learn about Alan’s problems, and watch as he makes connections with an eccentric cab driver, a Saudi doctor, and the Danish ambassador to the Middle Eastern country.
A Hologram for the King is so episodic that it just barely hangs together as a narrative. Day after day Alan oversleeps and misses the shuttle from the hotel to the King’s Metropolis of Economy and Trade, where his team is trying to prepare for their presentation. Each time he sleeps through his alarm, Alan calls Yousef, a man the hotel concierge recommends. Yousef isn’t so much a cab driver as he is a guy with a somewhat reliable car who is willing to drive Alan the several hour commute. This is a fish-out-of-water story, and Yousef lies squarely in the territory of the character whose eccentricity belies his ability to lead our hero through this strange new land.
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Bridge of Spies is a tale of two films. The second half of Steven Spielberg’s newest historical drama is a good representation of the high level of quality associated with the director’s work. The finale is dramatically tense and emotionally powerful while remaining understated in the message it conveys. The first half stands in stark contrast to all of that; it’s hindered by its rote execution and the way it delivers moral lessons as subtly as an atomic bomb. Bridge of Spies could be leaner and more effective if Spielberg and screenwriters Matt Charman and the Coen brothers had concentrated solely on the second dramatic arc of the story. As it is, the film gives the overall impression of being unfocused.
The movie begins in 1957 as the FBI arrests Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance) on suspicion of being a Soviet spy. The evidence against Abel is quite damning, but the U.S. government wants to show the world that everyone, even those accused of espionage, is afforded the same protections under the law. This protection boils down to having access to competent legal counsel. To that end, the FBI convinces James Donovan (Tom Hanks) – an insurance settlement lawyer with criminal trial experience – to represent Abel. Donovan believes in the American justice system, so he provides his client with a zealous defense, even moving forward with an appeal when Abel is convicted on all counts. He does this to the chagrin of his colleagues at the firm, the judge in the case, and even his own family.
It would be one thing if the writers stuck to the maxim of “show, don’t tell” to illustrate the moral superiority of treating even the worst criminals with the same dignity and humanity granted all U.S. citizens. After all, the case can be made that it’s a lesson worth re-learning since the war on terror began – especially for those in positions of power. But Charman, Spielberg and the Coens don’t just show. They tell, and tell, and tell. Tom Hanks is one of the finest actors of his generation, and his performance in Bridge of Spies is as good as you would expect. But by the fifth or sixth time he explains the importance of due process to those who want blood, the point becomes excruciatingly belabored.
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